Amazon Says Goodbye to 'Incentivized' Customer Reviews

User reviews are tricky to navigate. You assume you're getting the unvarnished opinions of your fellow shoppers, who've paid their hard-earned money for a product. But what if you're not getting that? How could you tell?
This conundrum is what Amazon is trying to combat with its new customer review policies.
Amazon Will Now Play Review Middleman
Customers had previously been allowed to publish "incentivized" product reviews (the item in question provided for free in exchange for a nominally objective review), so long as that transaction was disclosed. As of October 3, all such reviews go through the invite-only Amazon Vine program.
This means Amazon will be responsible for identifying trusted reviewers and providing them with products to review, which removes all contact between the seller and the customer. (Books are the only category exempted from this restriction.) This should lessen the likelihood of biased reviews. Amazon Vine reviews will, of course, be clearly marked.
SEE ALSO: Are You Really Seeing the Best Price on Amazon?
Amazon isn't the first company to fight back against the effect of review compensation on the reliability of scores. Last month, digital games store Steam stipulated that reviews of games activated via keys purchased from other sites, or provided directly from the publisher, would still be published, but would have no effect on the review score average.
Readers, does this change affect how you feel about Amazon customer reviews? Do you trust them any more or less than traditional product reviews? Let us know in the comments below!

I received access to this comment page in exchange for my membership on this website. The previous sentence is my own joke and was in no way influenced by my free membership of this free site. The first 2 sentences are straight truth.
I quit buying anything from amazon and will continue so.
Most products tend to then end up as top of the rating chain despite being cheap, flawed china products.
For example: I bought a jump starter. Item got 5 stars, claimed 800 Amps and 16800 battery. It worked once and then melted. When opening it have a 4000MaH battery.
Second one recently was a travel battery. Same deal.
So now you need to sift through scores of reviews to spot the biased/rigged ones.
I for one believe Amazon needs to treat the reviews as an important part of attracting visitors and buyers to the site. Letting it deteriorate like what was happening was bad.
Long story short, I applaud the move.
However, I read MANY Vine reviews where it's clear the guy never even took it out of the package (he probably just resold it later). These are the people that make me angry and give Vine reviewers a bad name.
You have to remember, people are more likely to write reviews for products they had problems with because they're angry, that's why you see more 1 & 2 star reviews from non-Vine folks.
Vine has it's place, but every review should be evaluated separately.
There are users that create accounts and buy blocks of positive votes for obscure products to propel themselves into the top 10k so that they might get noticed for a possible vine contact.
For one thing, if they receive it for free, then they should say they get it for free. There is no such thing as either "received a discount or for free." They know for certain if they get it for free.
And most of those reviews have no details regarding the product. Example: They say they like it, or it is a good product.
Too generic.
What gets me is one case: a product lists the battery life as 6 hours. My testing with the product shows 2 hours. (later I returned it for refund). And a reviewer said he got 8 hours of battery life.
Seems Amazon is more interested in positive reviews for partners than real-world reviews for their customers.
Now if they'll just start filtering out the one-word reviews as well. When I read a five-star review that says nothing other than "Great" or "Perfect," it drives up the rating, but tells me absolutely nothing about the product or why they rated it five stars.
I used to really value the reviews on Amazon and leaned on them a great deal to guide my buying decision...but I don't any more.